Thursday, January 19, 2012

Pirating material

James at Dreams of Mythic Fantasy takes a nice stand on piracy. Read his comments(short and to the point). Piracy be wrong. No matter the company, it takes money, time, effort and energy to create something. Without some compensation, most people would not have the time to make them - especially large products like those from WoTC. Also, if it ain't yours, don't take it. Sheesh.

Also check out the weird unnamed Map at this link. Looks like a Dinosaur world.

4 comments:

You are wrong. People will create stuff no matter what. They were doing so long before printing guilds invented the notion of copyright. They continue to do so, just look around at all the fanzines, hobby material and blogs. And will in the future, more so if there weren't such oppressive copyright laws in place.

Maybe not as flashy and marketed as commercial material. But, all that profit driven gloss is very unnecessary. Rather get and share stuff born of passion than products calculated for a market segment.

Maybe The original copyright (14yr + 14 more with extension) would be ok. But, current U.S. copyright is an egregious travesty of cultue and society. It should be actively opposed.

Listening to a song for free is about as unethical as checking a book out of the library for free.

That's what I thought when I first saw the internet, that it was like a big library. There's been a lot of propaganda against it though. It amazes me that one thing is held so high and the other so low. But I guess that's the power of PR.

I know that it might put an end to various business ventures and models. I know that going in and I'm ok with that. Thinking otherwise is kidding yourself.

Yes, creators deserve compensation. But copyright isn't the way to get it anymore. New business models are needed. For example: I would donate to something like a kickstarter to have a band i liked release a song for free. I will never again pay for a shiny disk of music that can be copied infinitely with the click of a button; that would be stupid.

RPG books are different, btw. They still have value as physical objects so I still buy them. I'll "pirate" them to see if I want to run it, and if I do I'll end up buying it. In fact, I'm more likely to buy books that have free PDFs, legal or otherwise kicking around! Without a preview, it's too much of a craps shoot. Only oD&D is the perfect storm of abandonded, decaying, short enough to print off.

Briefly stated, "intellectual property" laws are unjust grants of monopoly that were designed from the beginning to profit certain lazy, monied interests at the expense of society as a whole. They've proven to be very successful in meeting their goal.

Calling the sharing of information "piracy" or equating such sharing with theft is at best a misunderstanding and at worst a deliberate and malicious deception.

It is well documented that intellectual monopoly laws do nothing to encourage the creation of creative works. To the contrary, in fact - they stifle innovation.